India's bribery rate is 69%, highest in Asia Pacific; Pakistan's 40%, China's 26%, Sri Lanka's 23%, Japan's 0.2%: Report

By A Representative
A recent report by a Berlin-based non-profit, Transparency International, has qualified India as the most corrupt country in the Asia-Pacific region. Based on interviews with 21,861 people in 16 countries of the region, the report says that while the “bribery rate” in India was highest at 69%, it was the lowest in Japan, 0.2%.
Conducted in India by Cvoter International for Transparency International through mainly face-to-face interviews with 2,802 people, the survey finds 73% of the poorest people paid bribe, as against the regional average of just 38%. Interestingly, 55% of the richest people in India also said they paid bribe.
The report carries the photograph of activists of NGO Prayas rescuing a trafficked child in a train reaching Mumbai from the India-Nepal border town of Raxaul, insisting, “Corruption is increasingly cited as a key cause and traffickers rarely face justice.
It adds, “Corruption both facilitates trafficking and feeds the flow of people by destabilizing democracies, weakening a country’s rule of law and stalling development.”
Across all the countries, people were asked about corruption in six key public services during the previous 12 months – public schools, public clinics or hospitals, official documents, utility services, the police and the courts.
The report says, as compared to India, the bribery rate was Vietnam is 65%, followed by Thailand 41%, Pakistan, Myanmar and Cambodia (40% each), Indonesia 32%, China 26%, Malaysia 23%, Mongolia 20%, Sri Lanka 15%, Taiwan 6%, Australia 4%, South Korea 3%, and Japan 0.2%.

Activists in Mumbai identify child victim of trafficking,
"rampant" due to corruption

Ironically, despite such high bribery rate, the survey results show that 53% of those interviewed found that the government in India was “doing well” in fighting corruption, while 35% said, it was doing badly. At the same time, 41% of those interviewed said that the level of corruption has “increased” in India.
The survey further found that 63% agreed when asked, “Can ordinary people make a difference in the fight against corruption?” This is against 53% in Pakistan, 49% in Japan, 53% in Vietnam, 66% in South Korea, 72% in Thailand, 73% in Sri Lanka, 78% in Indonesia and 80% in Australia.
Conducted between July 2015 and January 2017, the survey is based on what the report says, “the Global Corruption Barometer 2017”, with questions asked “via face to face or telephone survey in the Asia Pacific region, with a random selection of adults in all 16 surveyed countries, territories and regions.”
“Face to face household interviews were conducted either with Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI) or Paper-and-Pencil Interviewing (PAPI)”, the report adds.
“To calculate the total number of bribe payers in the Asia Pacific region, we used the national bribery rates (the percentage of all adults who had paid a bribe) to calculate the number of bribe payers in each country/territory/ region”, says the report, adding, “We then added the projected number of bribe payers across all 16 countries/territories.”
It further says, “The scores are based on the percentage of respondents in each country/ territory who say that corruption has either increased a little or increased a lot over the 12 months prior to when the survey was conducted.”

Comments

Urgent need to study cause of large number of natural deaths in Gulf countries

By Venkatesh Nayak* According to data tabled in Parliament in April 2018, there are 87.76 lakh (8.77 million) Indians in six Gulf countries, namely Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). While replying to an Unstarred Question (#6091) raised in the Lok Sabha, the Union Minister of State for External Affairs said, during the first half of this financial year alone (between April-September 2018), blue-collared Indian workers in these countries had remitted USD 33.47 Billion back home. Not much is known about the human cost of such earnings which swell up the country’s forex reserves quietly. My recent RTI intervention and research of proceedings in Parliament has revealed that between 2012 and mid-2018 more than 24,570 Indian Workers died in these Gulf countries. This works out to an average of more than 10 deaths per day. For every US$ 1 Billion they remitted to India during the same period there were at least 117 deaths of Indian Workers in Gulf ...

A comrade in culture and controversy: Yao Wenyuan’s revolutionary legacy

By Harsh Thakor* This year marks two important anniversaries in Chinese revolutionary history—the 20th death anniversary of Yao Wenyuan, and the 50th anniversary of his seminal essay "On the Social Basis of the Lin Biao Anti-Party Clique". These milestones invite reflection on the man whose pen ignited the first sparks of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and whose sharp ideological interventions left an indelible imprint on the political and cultural landscape of socialist China.

India's health workers have no legal right for their protection, regrets NGO network

Counterview Desk In a letter to Union labour and employment minister Santosh Gangwar, the civil rights group Occupational and Environmental Health Network of India (OEHNI), writing against the backdrop of strike by Bhabha hospital heath care workers, has insisted that they should be given “clear legal right for their protection”.

Uttarakhand tunnel disaster: 'Question mark' on rescue plan, appraisal, construction

By Bhim Singh Rawat* As many as 40 workers were trapped inside Barkot-Silkyara tunnel in Uttarkashi after a portion of the 4.5 km long, supposedly completed portion of the tunnel, collapsed early morning on Sunday, Nov 12, 2023. The incident has once again raised several questions over negligence in planning, appraisal and construction, absence of emergency rescue plan, violations of labour laws and environmental norms resulting in this avoidable accident.

History, culture and literature of Fatehpur, UP, from where Maulana Hasrat Mohani hailed

By Vidya Bhushan Rawat* Maulana Hasrat Mohani was a member of the Constituent Assembly and an extremely important leader of our freedom movement. Born in Unnao district of Uttar Pradesh, Hasrat Mohani's relationship with nearby district of Fatehpur is interesting and not explored much by biographers and historians. Dr Mohammad Ismail Azad Fatehpuri has written a book on Maulana Hasrat Mohani and Fatehpur. The book is in Urdu. He has just come out with another important book, 'Hindi kee Pratham Rachna: Chandayan' authored by Mulla Daud Dalmai.' During my recent visit to Fatehpur town, I had an opportunity to meet Dr Mohammad Ismail Azad Fatehpuri and recorded a conversation with him on issues of history, culture and literature of Fatehpur. Sharing this conversation here with you. Kindly click this link. --- *Human rights defender. Facebook https://www.facebook.com/vbrawat , X @freetohumanity, Skype @vbrawat

Job opportunities decreasing, wages remain low: Delhi construction workers' plight

By Bharat Dogra* It was about 32 years back that a hut colony in posh Prashant Vihar area of Delhi was demolished. It was after a great struggle that the people evicted from here could get alternative plots that were not too far away from their earlier colony. Nirmana, an organization of construction workers, played an important role in helping the evicted people to get this alternative land. At that time it was a big relief to get this alternative land, even though the plots given to them were very small ones of 10X8 feet size. The people worked hard to construct new houses, often constructing two floors so that the family could be accommodated in the small plots. However a recent visit revealed that people are rather disheartened now by a number of adverse factors. They have not been given the proper allotment papers yet. There is still no sewer system here. They have to use public toilets constructed some distance away which can sometimes be quite messy. There is still no...

Women's rights leaders told to negotiate with Muslimness, as India's donor agencies shun the word Muslim

By A Representative Former vice-president Hamid Ansari has sharply criticized donor agencies engaged in nongovernmental development work, saying that they seek to "help out" marginalizes communities with their funds, but shy away from naming Muslims as the target group, something, he insisted, needs to change. Speaking at a book release function in Delhi, he said, since large sections of Muslims are poor, they need political as also social outreach.

Warning bells for India: Tribal exploitation by powerful corporate interests may turn into international issue

By Ashok Shrimali* Warning bells are ringing for India. Even as news drops in from Odisha that Adivasi villages, one after another, are rejecting the top UK-based MNC Vedanta's plea for mining, a recent move by two senior scholars Felix Padel and Samarendra Das suggests the way tribals are being exploited in India by powerful international and national business interests may become an international issue. In fact, one has only to count days when things may be taken up at the United Nations level, with India being pushed to the corner. Padel, it may be recalled, is a major British authority on indigenous peoples across the world, with several scholarly books to his credit.

Gujarat Bitcoin scam worth Rs 5,000 crore "linked" with BJP leaders: Need for Supreme Court monitored probe

By Shaktisinh Gohil* BJP hit a jackpot in the form of demonetisation, which it used as an alibi to convert black money into white in Gujarat. Even as party scrambles for answers of how the Ahmedabad District Cooperative Bank (ADCB), whose director is BJP president Amit Shah, received old currency worth Rs 745.58 crore in just five days, and how Rs 3118.51 crore was deposited in 11 district cooperative banks linked with Gujarat BJP leaders, a new mega Bitcoin scam, worth more than Rs 5,000 crore has been unraveled.

Counterview

Search This Blog